Monday, January 25, 2010

NEW Evidence: Climate Change Scientists Are Manipulating Data

Its been a bad couple of months for Al Gore and his man-made climate change "scientific consensus." Between Climategate, the phony hockey stick, The NASA climate change guru who refused to fix bogus numbers, and the big Himalayan Glacier Melt even some climate change believers are starting to wonder which data is real and what has been manipulated.

Over the weekend we were informed that Dr Murari Lal, one of the UN's Climate Change gurus knew all along that the Himalayan glacier melt prediction which turned out to be 300 years off, might be bogus. But the prediction was not corrected because the UN's climate moonbats wanted to use the dire warming prediction to place additional pressure on policy makers to take global warming action.

Today is a new day, and that means its time for a new scandal. Today's revelation is that scientists have been cherry picking arctic data in an effort to prove their man-made warming story. Some call it the mystery of the missing thermometers.

In the 1970s, nearly 600 Canadian weather stations fed surface temperature readings into a global database assembled by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Today, NOAA only collects data from 35 stations across Canada.

Worse, only one station -- at Eureka on Ellesmere Island -- is now used by NOAA as a temperature gauge for all Canadian territory above the Arctic Circle.

The Canadian government, meanwhile, operates 1,400 surface weather stations across the country, and more than 100 above the Arctic Circle, according to Environment Canada.

Well, why measure the cold areas it may add some truth to their numbers.

Yet as American researchers Joseph D’Aleo, a meteorologist, and E. Michael Smith, a computer programmer, point out in a study published on the website of the Science and Public Policy Institute, NOAA uses “just one thermometer [for measuring] everything north of latitude 65 degrees.”

Mr. D’Aleo and Mr. Smith say NOAA and another U.S. agency, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) have not only reduced the total number of Canadian weather stations in the database, but have “cherry picked” the ones that remain by choosing sites in relatively warmer places, including more southerly locations, or sites closer to airports, cities or the sea -- which has a warming effect on winter weather.

Over the past two decades, they say, “the percentage of [Canadian] stations in the lower elevations tripled and those at higher elevations, above 300 feet, were reduced in half.”

Using the agency’s own figures, Smith shows that in 1991, almost a quarter of NOAA’s Canadian temperature data came from stations in the high Arctic. The same region contributes only 3% of the Canadian data today.

Mr. D’Aleo and Mr. Smith say NOAA and GISS also ignore data from numerous weather stations in other parts of the world, including Russia, the U.S. and China.

They say NOAA collects no temperature data at all from Bolivia -- a high-altitude, landlocked country -- but instead “interpolates” or assigns temperature values for that country based on data from “nearby” temperature stations located at lower elevations in Peru, or in the Amazon basin.

The result, they say, is a warmer-than-truthful global temperature record.

“NOAA . . . systematically eliminated 75% of the world’s stations with a clear bias towards removing higher latitude, high altitude and rural locations, all of which had a tendency to be cooler,” the authors say. “The thermometers in a sense, marched towards the tropics, the sea, and to airport tarmacs.”

The NOAA database forms the basis of the influential climate modelling work, and the dire, periodic warnings on climate change, issued by James Hanson, the director of the GISS in New York.

Hanson who has been responsible for much of the bogus climate change data. did issue a public statement on the matter earlier this week.

“NASA has not been involved in any manipulation of climate data used in the annual GISS global temperature analysis,” he said. “The agency is confident of the quality of this data and stands by previous scientifically-based conclusions regarding global temperatures.”

Just about a year ago we discovered that a different weather station" trick was being used on the other side of the earth in Antarctica:

It turned out that it was produced by a computer model based on combining the satellite evidence since 1979 with temperature readings from surface weather stations. The problem with Antarctica, though, is that has so few weather stations. So what the computer had been programmed to do, by a formula not yet revealed, was to estimate the data those missing weather stations would have come up with if they had existed. In other words, while confirming that the satellite data have indeed shown the Antarctic as cooling since 1979, the study relied ultimately on pure guesswork, to show that in the past 50 years the continent has warmed – by just one degree Fahrenheit. One of the first to express astonishment was Dr Kenneth Trenberth, a senior scientist with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a convinced believer in global warming, who wryly observed "it is hard to make data where none exists". A disbelieving Ross Hayes, an atmospheric scientist who has often visited the Antarctic for Nasa, sent Professor Steig a caustic email ending: "with statistics you can make numbers go to any conclusion you want. It saddens me to see members of the scientific community do this for media coverage." Source: Despite the hot air, the Antarctic is not warming up

Bogus numbers on top of the world, bogus numbers on the bottom. It seems that the scientific bookends holding up the man made global warming story are completely collapsing under the weight of their own lies.